Dance to Music to: Development of a Kinect-based musical tone player, and exploring possibility of it in application to motivate mobility of people

This report presents development of a Kinect-based application which can play different musical tones using inputs from body motions, and assessing its possibility to be used for encouraging mobility of people. The application is an interactive melody player system activated by human body motions th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Htun, Nyi Nyi
Format: Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Language:English
Published: 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/30904/
Description
Summary:This report presents development of a Kinect-based application which can play different musical tones using inputs from body motions, and assessing its possibility to be used for encouraging mobility of people. The application is an interactive melody player system activated by human body motions that are detected by Kinect sensor. The application constantly captures six parts of a human body which are head, hip and both upper and lower limbs, allowing each part of them to play different notes independently over different MIDI channels. As a result, it turns the whole body into a combination of six musical instruments. The application was assessed by conducting user evaluation which included trial and interview. There were altogether 10 participants. They were asked to try testing the application for about 5 to 10 minutes, which was then followed by interview. Results of the interview suggested that this approach has a very high possibility to inspire people to do more exercises. However, further researches and studies are required to fully understand how we would be able to encourage mobility of people with the use of new technologies. Besides, the question of how intense it can inspire people to do more exercises and so reducing the risks of diseases such as cardiovascular related complications in obesity and diabetes patients has yet to be explored further.